


The Dung Beetle Provocation

by ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume V, Missing Scenes [5]
Category: Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Immortality AU Timestamp, M/M, Playing Doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 23:31:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13398582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: Oh no, a most unfortunate accident has befallen one of our heroes!  Luckily, there's a doctor in the house.  And a cat.





	The Dung Beetle Provocation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Donna_Immaculata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/gifts).



> Dear Donna, I wanted to make you something nice for your birthday, but unfortunately, what I made you is _this_. I feel a bit like Athos in this story... Happy birthday anyways!

The night before Easter Sunday was a quiet one in the Berkeley Hills. Fog rose slowly up from the bay, enveloping the town and the campus like a soothing shroud, hiding everyone beneath from the stars and the snooping eye of the Moon, as she hung in a crescent over the layer of marine condensation.

A stifled cry sounded from the first floor, roughly the kitchen, and that was where the Grigori’s quick step took him, his face reflecting no more than the practiced stoicism honed over millennia in the service of his incredibly wayward charge.

“Kyrios!”

“Do not _Kyrios_ me,” Athos hissed back. He had been cradling his own arm, drops of blood seeping through the long sleeve of his white cotton button-down.

“You could’ve rolled up your sleeves,” Grimley stated with a pout. “Oh, why do I bother. It isn’t as if you ever paid heed to where you bled, why start now! Master, we _live_ in a society.”

“What’s your point, gnat?”

“There are people we can simply pay if you’re into…”

“Shut up!” Athos cut him off, his eyes closed in consternation. “Where’s Aramis?”

“Studying upstairs,” Grimley replied with a twirl of a kitchen towel. “Shall I…?”

“No,” Athos held him back with his good arm. “Aramis will do it.”

The god in a professor’s clothing suppressed another groan at the jolt of pain, where his radius stuck broken and poking through the flesh of his arm.

“Aramis will do it,” the Grigori echoed. “The doctor is in the house,” he added with a flourish and shook his head as his Kyrios slid by and rapidly ascended the stairs.

***

The man who had once been Dr Flitterbatt, and was determined to be so again, was sitting in a twirling office chair, surrounded by several piles of journals. His hair had been swept out of his face and pinned up in a messy bun, as he quickly leafed through an article, stopping now and then to underline a particularly interesting observation.

“It’s amazing how in hundreds of years that I’ve observed humans practice medicine, so little has changed even while such strides have been made in medical science,” he mused, speaking ostensibly to the black cat sitting on top of the narrow divan in the corner of the study. “Barbaric!” he concluded, setting the article aside, only to pick up the next one.

Two brief knocks sounded at the door and, before Aramis had the fortitude to speak, the handle turned and his companion entered the room. His face was pale and he’d been cradling his left arm against his chest in a way that would’ve seemed almost pathetic, had his companion not in fact been the actual God of Discord.

“What’s this, chyortik?” Athos smiled, looking between the cat and the student. “Being so studious on a Saturday night?”

“They don’t call it practicing medicine for nothing, professor. One must practice,” Aramis replied and rose from his chair.

“Then you’ll be happy to hear you have an excellent chance to do so now.”

“What’s wrong with your arm?” Aramis asked, slightly peeved at the worry that still crept into his tone when dealing with matters of Athosian nature.

With some effort, the arm in question was unfurled before him. “Pretty sure it’s broken,” Athos said. “What’s your astute medical opinion, doctor?”

Aramis had barely touched the appendage when, “Jesus! Sit down!” and Athos was unceremoniously pushed down onto the divan, scaring the cat. “Well, now you’ve frightened Nyx.” Aramis sighed as the cat shot somewhere behind the bookshelves.

“She’s skittish, like you, chyortik,” Athos smiled while Aramis shook his head.

“I’ll have to set your bones. I’m not even going to ask what happened there…”

“Would you believe I fell?”

“Did you fall off the fucking Campanile?” Aramis rolled his eyes and pulled an old leather satchel from under his desk.

“You don’t have to patch me up,” Athos spoke while his physician carefully rolled up the bloodstained sleeve and exposed his wound. “It might be easier to just cut this arm off. I’ll grow a new one and you can practice amputation.”

“It is the twenty-first century. Medical science has advanced sufficiently for us at least not to have to resort to _that_.” A small huff of a laugh escaped through his nostrils and he dabbed at the wound with an alcohol-soaked cotton pad. “Is it a coincidence that your arm is broken at a time that I’m doing an ortho surgical rotation?”

“Oh nightwing,” Athos laughed softly, “it’s as if I pay attention to what silly fuckery you get up to when you play doctor.”

“Careful, Discord,” Aramis replied without any heat, “or I’ll set your arm bones wrong and then where will you be?”

“Mildly inconvenienced, I imagine,” Athos replied with a shrug. The cat had poked her head out from under the bookshelf and eyed the pair of men suspiciously. “Nyx still doesn’t trust me, it seems.”

“You’re rather more of a dog person, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Athos looked up and leaned forward to catch one of Aramis’ stray locks between his teeth. “ _Kitten_.”

“Don’t distract me, you fool,” Aramis replied, determined not to allow the other man to get the better of him. He was, after all, a consummate professional. “Do you want the anesthetic or…?”

“Aramis, I don’t need any fucking…”

“This is going to hurt,” he warned narily a moment before pulling on his patient’s arm.

The bone shifted, crunched, and snapped back into place. “ _Fuck_ ,” Athos exhaled. “You wouldn’t do this to a human patient, would you?”

“You declined the anesthetic,” Aramis pointed out, rummaging in his bag again.

Athos’ voice was a low, husky whisper. “I’m bleeding, Aramis.”

The doctor’s pulse sped up. “I’m aware of that.” He pulled more bandages and something that could passably be used as a splint from his bag and set it on the couch next to him. “Should I bother with this?” he pointed to his supplies. “Or will you be healed by morning regardless?”

“I’m not sure, doctor, but I’m in a great amount of distress currently.”

Aramis grinned and leaned over his patient’s arm, licking at the wound that still seeped with fresh droplets of rich divine ichor. “I should kiss it better then,” he whispered, letting his lips and tongue traverse the forearm, lingering on the pulsepoint of the wrist that beat a soft rhythm against his mouth.

“Your bedside manner is nonpareil, chyortik,” Athos whispered, his pulse quickening at the long swipes of the tongue that toyed with his skin and flicked against his veins. Aramis’ teeth grazed over the flesh of his thumb, bit gently into the mount of Venus, hot lips pressing into the center of his palm.

“I’ll put the splint on you then,” Aramis stated with half-lidded eyes, drunk on the flavor of his god’s ichor. He worked quickly, nimble fingers applying the splint and the bindings to the forearm that rested along his knees. “This was a terrible idea,” Aramis was saying, avoiding meeting his lover’s eyes. “At least last year when you got that tramp stamp of the bat that faded by morning, it wasn’t… well quite so graphic.”

“It said ‘I love flittermouse’ around it. That’s pretty graphic.”

“You’re an idiot,” Aramis smiled. “You’ve really run out of ideas, haven’t you?”

“Happy birthday, flittermouse,” Athos’ own smile reflected his lover’s.

“What will you do next year, hm? Disembowel yourself so that I can stitch you back together?”

“Well, I suppose that depends on whether you’ll still be into this surgery fetish of yours, or if you’d moved on to a new hobby.”

“Ass.”

The cat shot under the divan, as if sensing that her presence was becoming superfluous. Aramis put the leather satchel down on the floor, and moved it away with his foot.

“I just want chyortik to be top of his class,” Athos said, letting his body tumble over and stretching out in Aramis’ lap, long legs dangling over the side of the couch.

“Such an elitist,” Aramis muttered, fingers idling in the curls that tickled his stomach through the thin cotton of his shirt.

Athos reached up with his uninjured arm to pull his lover down for a kiss. “I like what I like,” he whispered. Their lips melted together with practiced ease, soft and hard at once, hands gently cradling each other’s necks as their tongues brushed with unhurried softness.

“Maybe you can get my face tattooed on your arse next year,” Aramis whispered in between lazy kisses.

“A portrait of my nightwing that would disappear by morning?” Athos’ lips brushed over his lover’s knuckles, one at a time. “Now that I could certainly endorse.” Having kissed the last knuckle, he guided Aramis’ hand down towards the bulge striving against the confines of his trousers. “Ready for your other birthday present?”

A soft knock on the door made Aramis groan and throw his head back in exasperation. His fingers pressed against the swell of Athos’ crotch with vindictive insistence.

“Thousand pardons, esteemed lords! I merely want to let the cat out of the room, lest she be traumatized by all the gore and the _thrusting…_ ”

“Do you know how many times that cat has watched us fuck?” Athos shouted at the door.

“That explains why she’s so brain addled, Kyrios.”

“Forget it,” Athos groaned and regretfully lifted himself from Aramis’ lap. “It’s Saturday night. We can just go fuck in my office, where he _isn’t_.”

“Oh?” One corner of Aramis’ mouth turned up in a half-tick. “You want to fuck me in your office, do you, professor?”

“Well… we haven’t done that yet…”

“We can pretend I am one of your students,” Aramis suggested, rising up and pulling Athos off the divan after himself.

“Would you _like_ to pretend you’re my student?” Athos asked with some amount of suspicion.

“We’ll never know until we try,” Aramis replied and opened the door to let the cat flying out of the room, past Grimley and his exorbitantly smug face.

“Is your arm all better, Kyrios?” the Watcher inquired solicitously.

“Shut up, you infernal dung beetle.”

“You know, dung beetles exhibit fascinating mating behavior, Kyrios,” the Grigori began to expound, following his two masters down the stairs. “The female digs a tunnel beneath the dung and stores some food in there. Then, a single male will stand as a burrow warden and fight off other males who attempt to go into the tunnel, until only the biggest and strongest one succeeds and gets the girl, so to speak.”

“What the hell are you talking about, you idiot?”

“Don’t mind him, Aramis, this is typical Olympian behavior.”

“But sometimes,” Grimley went on with alacrity, “the smaller, hornless males will bypass the burrow warden entirely by digging their own side-tunnel, and mating with the female that way!”

“That _does_ sound Olympian, Athos.”

“Don’t encourage him, babe.”

“What is truly fascinating,” the Grigori prattled on, handing his master his coat and scarf, “is that these bypassing males often have the largest testicles and therefore a greater capacity to produce largest quantities of sperm, thus assuring them of copious progeny.”

“I’ve never wanted to have sex less in my life,” Aramis sighed.

“We’ll work on that dysfunction in my office,” Athos promised. “Adieu, Grigori!”

“Happy birthday, Dr Flitterbatt!” Grimley waved from the front porch as the two figures disappeared into the fog. “And many more, etc.” The Grigori turned to go into the house with a pleased expression upon his physiognomy. “Come on now, Nyx,” he said to the cat, “let us go Netflix and… blissfully alone, then.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Campanile is a [big penis](http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Campanile-by-D.H.-Parks.jpg) that stands in the middle of the UC Berkeley campus, where Professor Thunderson teaches history.


End file.
